A US soldier, on a US Army M113, in Panama during "Operation Just Cause" on December 21, 1989. Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann presents the US invasion as a model for international intervention in Venezuela. (J. Elliot / US Department of Defense)

Before we get into the meat of things, I’d like to congratulate Hausmann on his hilarious D-Day comparison; you know you’re in for a fun ride when Godwin's law has already been Blitzkrieged before we’ve gotten past the headline. Presumably, the reader is supposed to fill in the blanks by concluding that the Hitler to Hausmann’s “D-Day” is Maduro.

Hausmann’s D-Day landing

“As solutions go, why not consider the following one: the National Assembly could impeach Maduro,” Hausmann suggested, beginning on a relatively tame note.

“The Assembly could constitutionally appoint a new government, which in turn could request military assistance from a coalition of the willing, including Latin American, North American, and European countries. This force would free Venezuela, in the same way Canadians, Australians, Brits, and Americans liberated Europe in 1944-1945,” he argued.

“My guess is in most of these instances the Venezuelan military are going to back down because they know they are completely outgunned, so it doesn’t make any sense for them to fight,” he said in a follow-up interview.

Even better, he argued the plan could circumvent the need for United Nations approval, as the foreign military forces would have technically been invited by the newly installed regime.

It all sounds so simple, until you realise Hausmann’s plan would undoubtedly create a humanitarian disaster that would make the current economic downturn look positively delightful.

The Panama model: Small country, big humanitarian price

Seeking to justify foreign intervention, Hausmann himself looked to the 1989 US intervention in Panama as a model.

“It would be akin to the US liberating Panama from the oppression of Manuel Noriega, ushering in democracy and the fastest economic growth in Latin America,” he stated.

Fun fact: anywhere from a few hundred to 4000 Panamanian non-combatants were killed during the intervention. In the aftermath of the violence, even the Washington lapdogs at Human Rights Watch couldn’t contain their horror at the conduct of US forces.

“[Estimates of the civilian death toll] reveal that the ‘surgical operation’ by American forces inflicted a toll in civilian lives that was at least four-and-a-half times higher than military causalities in the enemy, and twelve or thirteen times higher than the casualties suffered by US troops,” HRW noted in a grim 1991 report.

The report continued, “By themselves these ratios suggest that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimise harm to civilians, where doing so would not compromise a legitimate military objective, were not faithfully observed by they invading US forces.”

Of course, Panama is not comparable to Venezuela. For one, anyone unfamiliar with geography may not realise Panama is absolutely tiny; in 1989, it had a population of less than 2.5 million. 2018 Venezuela, on the other hand, is more than 12 times larger, with a population of over 31 million. So if we assume Hausmann’sintervention is carried out with a similar level of relative brutality to that of Panama, the death toll could easily be in the thousands.

This brings me to my next key point. As the perceptive reader may have noticed, there’s a common pattern among Western interventions: they’re all followed by years – if not decades – of horrific internal conflict and instability. Any rational observer would assume the same would be true of Venezuela, a deeply divided country with an extremely complex political situation. Hausmann himself should be aware of this, given his impressive résumé.

A former Venezuelan planning minister, he is today a professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University. Needless to say, his academic credentials and familiarity with Venezuela would lead one to presume he should already understand everything I’ve mentioned here. The same could be said for virtually all prominent voices demanding direct intervention in Venezuela. With decades of data under our collective belts, the question of whether or not military intervention can be conducted humanely is well and truly settled. Intervention is just a polite term for mass murder.

Returning full circle to our unabashed allied assault on Mike Godwin’s most sacred of laws, odds are Hausmann’s suggested intervention would bear no noteworthy similarities to the liberation of Europe from the Nazi nightmare. In fact, forget “D-Day Venezuela” entirely: more appropriate WWII comparisons would bear names like Fall Rot, Fall Weiss, Barbarossa and Fall Gelb.

Alas, it should be clear that suggesting an armed intervention in Venezuela is about as mature as trying to construct an argument based on an intellectually lazy allusion to Nazism. Think what you will of him, but Maduro is no Hitler, and a Venezuelan D-Day would be a bloodbath on a scale the country hasn’t seen for a very long time (if ever).

So when it comes to Venezuela, there is no solution but peace. Anyone who says otherwise must be called out for exactly what they are: dangerously ignorant at best, warmongers at worst.

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